2020 Hindsight

More Manila moving notes - images

So today I'm downloading via FTP all the static content of my 2020 site, i.e., that statically rendered pages generated from the dynamic Manila site. I know I'm going to have to change all the pointers to the images, so I checked to see how they work right now.

I checked an old static page, and the images contained on that page point to (wait for it) http://static.userland.com/images/SusansSperiment (Susan's Speriment was the name of my blog for oh, about 3 days before I thought of something better to call it). Anyway, static.userland.com?!? That dates back three years. I went to paid Manila hosting at weblogger.com in late June of 2001. (any relation to another weblog move--at the end of June, mind you--is purely coincidental)

So. I guess that, once you upload an image in Manila in a way that points to image serving from a static source, which UserLand began offering on 1 Mar '00). Whatever internal map-to-static-server that Manila uses for pre-first move images never got switched over when I first moved to weblogger.com three years ago.

Even when you transfer a root from one place to the next (and all the images *were* gathered in the site.root), the pointers didn't get changed. So, thanks UserLand, you've been hosting my substantial image collection unbeknownst to me! Once I get all this worked out, your bandwidth requirements should drop a little bit.

PapaScott needs help creating a script to convert a Manila site

Scott Hanson has had my exported site, in the XML format that Radio creates, and has been working on modifying his script to convert that to a more universal format (Movable Type, since everyone tends to deal with that.)

But it's more complicated than what he converted his site a coupla years ago. (I've got News Items. I've activated--but haven't really used for a while-- John VanDyk's MetaData plugin. And Manila itself has probably morphed over time since the time Scott did his original conversion.)

He's created a Converting Manila Wiki where he's documenting his problems. If you know XML, if you know scripts, if you know the guts of Manila/Frontier, please take a look.

(I knew, I just knew, this wasn't gonna be easy. My technical knowledge has great limitations. And frankly, even tho I started this on June 2--20 days ago--, aiming to be done by end of month, I'm kicking myself for not beginning earlier. All this happens to coincide --in timing, but not in causality--with that large hullaballoo about the Weblogs.com outage and the transition plan notwithstanding. I only hope that my doings here will be A Help To Others.)

Thank you, Andre Radke

Thanks, Andre! My Manila export worked!

making headway

Thanks to emails From Those Who Know More Than Me, and a helpful word here in my discussion group, I'm making slow headway with the whole Radio TheXMLFiles thing. Got some advice, gonna give it another try, and I'll report results...

UPDATE, 7:30pm: I have made further headway. Got through all the "outline doesn't exist" problems. Thanks to Jeff Cheney, Andre Radke for pointing out the problem and to Thomas Creedon whose post also confirmed it.

I documented the steps I took at the Radio UserLand discussion group thread on The XML Files, to share the love, or the sweat, or to cut down on the time someone else might take trying to fix this problem.

I started working on this on June 2. Ten days later, I have solved oen major problem and hope to get this next one (is it the last one? I hope so. But I won't know until I get there) behind me.

Converted all 4400+ messages and am now into other parts of the site. It choked while working on stats. Here's the error message and the accompanying site root table, as seen in Radio UserLand:

UserLand Radio and The XML Files -- I wanna believe

Long story short: I'm trying to export my Manila site (4481 messages and counting) and I'm not able to complete the process. I'm using Radio and a tool The XML Files (which, by the way, was hailed for being a remarkable bit of software around the time of its release).

I've tried it twice and the export process breaks at the same place... ironically on the Manilapalooza message from that happy day in March 2000 when I met many Manila-users face to face, and where Dave Winer introduced something called Pike, which later became Radio UserLand.

Message 546 (which was successfully processed by The XML Files) is a picture of Kate of the gone-and-lamented BrdBrain. That one worked. Message 547 (see error pix below) is the message telling the story of the day, including all the pictures.

For some reason, Message 547 wants an entity called Outline, which, alas, is not defined.

Clicking the Go To button results in this (snipped) bit of UserTalk code

If this kind of thing interests you, read the detailed story with the unedited screenshot of theXmlFilesSuite.serialize.message.

(Have a theory about custom urls, renewed the custom url for the Message 547 page, will try again and report my findings..... sigh. so far, download timed out. Will wait until after the top of the hour and try again. 7:30pm. Nope, didn't work.)

Coolio! Thanks, Jake!

WTG! Now Manila supports the Acronym and ABBR tags, part of the HTML 4.01 spec, as described by the W3C. OMG! I'm practically ROFL with glee.

Note: if you want to use these, try this:

<acronym title="Cascading Style Sheet">CSS</acronym>
in order to get this: CSS

And how did it get in there? I asked. Nicely. ; )

Now all I gotta do is figure out how to get the funky cursor pointer with the question mark to appear when you mouse over the acronyms. IIIOTIA.

Demo or Die

At least that's what someone in the software industry said the watchword was. It's the "real artists ship" version of the academic "Publish or Perish." All this blather is just a demo to a friend of how Manila works. We are taking a tour of different content management systems.

testing

Trying to get a feed/syndication thing going.

Here's what I get when I use the Manila macro to get the RSS Link: [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "rssLink" hasn't been defined.]

Here's what I get when I use a text link to XML feed

Here's the actual URL:

http://discuss.2020hindsight.org/xml/rss.xml

It'll all work fine on the dynamic site, but what about the static site? Will Manila munge up the URL?

Results: Text link works fine. Macro thingie dies. So no orange button for me!

Manila gets a News Aggregator

John Robb points to new Manila news: a news aggregator for Manila. I hope that "weblogger" will implement it.

Limits of Manila

I'm discovering some Manila limits:

1. Cascading Style Sheets and Static Rendering.
   

   You must must must make sure that there are no double carriage returns in your cascading style sheet. Otherwise, when rendered to static .html, double returns get rendered as a single <p> tag.(CSS styled code will not be display properly.)

2. Double returns and paragraph <p> tags.
   

   If you type in a text-entry area and hit return twice, you don't get a set of paragraph tags that enclose your paragraphs. (Such as this: <p>Some text </p> ) All you get is a single opening tag, like this: <p>
   

   Alas for you if you try to set up certain paragraph attributes. Ooops, no paragraph exists, so those attributes won't apply.

3. News Items editing
   

   Thou shalt not edit a News Item by selecting it from a Discuss message list. If thou attemptest to do so, thou wilt f*ck up thine News Item message and have to start over. (I'm wondering if I should remove News Items from my Discuss list altogether.)

4. News Items and courtesy rendering
   

   Manila usually automatically renders valid URLs and email addresses, and if you use the backslash to escape certain characters such as < or {, Manila will convert escaped characters to code equivalent. Bzzzzt! But not in the Edit News Item window (the place between creating and posting to home page.) Oddly enough, when the code is applied to a regular page, it displays properly. But working with the preview drives ya crazy in the meantime.

5. News Items and static rendering
   

   After clicking the "Post to Home Page" button for a News Item on a site that has static rendering, the next page that is displayed is not the dynamic home page, but the static one. Weird (unusual Manila behavior).